WebMD Newsroom

by Daniel J. DeNoon

Was the creation of a airborne killer flu virus a good idea? Should we call it frank science — or, after a certain mythical monster, Frankenflu?

If you haven’t yet heard, two different labs have deliberately created an H5N1 bird flu virus that can travel through the air from one ferret to another — and, most likely, from one person to another.  Why?

H5N1 spreads like wildfire among birds, yet doesn’t yet do this in humans. Reasoning that it would be good to know why, the U.S. NIH funded the two studies.

What did we learn? According to an NIH statement, we learned “that the H5N1 virus has greater potential than previously believed to gain a dangerous capacity to be transmitted among mammals, including perhaps humans ….”

H5N1 bird flu has about a 60% fatality rate. The virus behind the 1918 flu pandemic, the worst ever, had a 2% fatality rate. Is there a chance the virus could get loose?

“We are playing with fire,” say Thomas Inglesby, Anita Cicero, and D.A. Henderson of the Center for Biosecurity at UPMC.

“I think these were really stupid experiments that have little practical value,” blogs Howard Hughes Medical Institute evolutionary biologist Michael Eisen.

The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) wants scientific journals to withhold details of the study, in order to keep the information out of the hands of terrorists. However, as Eisen points out, the technique for making a mutant flu virus is low tech and well known. The real threat is that the virus will escape the lab.

It’s a risk worth taking in some cases. We need to know more about a lot of horrible bugs. But because of how flu bugs evolve, there’s only a small chance any eventual H5N1 pandemic virus will be the same as the man-made version. Unless it’s an escaped Frankenflu bug.

The risk is small, but not zero. And there is a precedent. In 1977, a flu bug that had become extinct suddenly re-emerged on the USSR/China border, causing widespread epidemics in 1978.  Despite official denials, most flu researchers believe the bug escaped from a lab.